Our Cosmic Ancestors (9 page)

Mayan astronomical clock

Classical period from AD 233-1027. The outer circle indicates the dates of our present calendar. The middle circle indicates the Mayan dates in baktuns and katuns. The inner circle indicates the Mayan dates in tuns

This clock showing the classical Mayan period, AD 233-1027. is based on the same principle as the calendar, but for only 290,160 days, or 372 Mars cycles. The Mayas also had a shorter calendar of 37,960 days representing 65 Venus cycles of 584 days, or 104 solar years of 365 days, or 146 sacred years of 260 days.

I must admit myself that when I first heard about the gigantic Mayan numbers I saw no importance in them and simply decided the ancient Mayas had been addicted to big numbers as some people are addicted to drugs, religion, or sex. It was only after I had discovered the constant of Nineveh and the secret of the Mayan calendar that my new respect for the achievements of our ancestors made me wonder if there could have been some common knowledge between the Sumerians who counted by sixty and the Mayas who counted by twenty. Most other people of antiquity used the decimal system like the Egyptians or counted by the dozen like the ancient Gauls or Babylonians.

One day as I looked at some notes taken years ago in Paris during a long discussion with my French specialist in Mayan culture, I noticed two especially mysterious numbers that had been found engraved in some Mayan ruins. One was 34,020 millions of days or about 93 millions of years and the other 147,420 millions of days or a little more than 403 millions of years. Expressed in sacred years of 260 days, the second number represented exactly 567 million years.

It is difficult to blame the archaeologists for ignoring these numbers. But since I am not an archaeologist and am used to the huge numbers involved in space exploration, the Mayan numbers did not discourage me. Before long I saw that the 34,020 million days represented fifteen times the Constant of Nineveh, while 147,420 million days represented it 65 times.

I spent a lot of time pondering why the Mayas would have used these huge constants before the answer came to me: they made all their calculations by 26 or 260 conjunctions. They needed a constant of the solar system that would be divisible by 260; and since the Nineveh constant represented for them 312,680 conjunctions, which cannot be divided by either 26 or 260, they invented a new constant of 34,020 millions of days that represented 78,170 great cycles of 260 conjunctions.

It is surely beyond imagination to think that thousands of years ago the Mayas could have, all by themselves, calculated a constant of 147,420 millions of days - a number that had twelve digits. But it is even more surprising to see that the same number, only 65 times smaller and expressed in seconds instead of days, has been used by Sumerians, a nation on the opposite side of the globe. This fact seems to indicate that the Mayas and the Sumerians must have had direct connections with each other or that they shared a common origin.

I would like to emphasize here that the first constant which the Mayas used equals exactly 3,600 Sumerian cycles of precession of the equinoxes of 9,450,000 days each. The reader can draw his own conclusions. But the number 3,600 certainly seems to be the root of all the astronomical calculations our ancestors made, as it is a basic number in the geometry of our planet. We have exactly 3,600 tenths of one degree in the circumference of the globe; and at the equator, each of these parts is equal to 36,000 Babylonian feet.

Most of the calendars of antiquity, no matter where, have been calculated from the movements of the celestial bodies, and the Mayan calendar is certainly not the only one that had been worked out from the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn. It is certainly interesting to observe how many important religious and political events coincide with the alignments of these two planets.

The conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn behind the Sun take place quite rarely. The last such event happened in 1881 and the one before that in 503 BC. Yet this cycle of 2,383 years was known to the astrologers many thousands of years before our era, as it repeated itself in the years 10,035; 7,652; 5,269; and 2,886 before Christ. The oldest date comes close to the time when the fabled Atlantis disappeared and the most recent seems to indicate the time of the Great Flood described in the Bible.

Among other ancient calendars, some were based on relative motions of the Moon and Sun and the most frequently used cycle was 10,800 years, or 599 Saros common to the Hindus, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians. Forty of these cycles made the great cycle of the Hindus and the great year of Berossus, high priest of Babylon.

The figure 10,800 also repeats itself in many other places. Multiples or fractions of this number can be found in sacred texts from all around the world. The Rig-Veda, the most important sacred book of the Hindus, has 10,800 verses and the altar of the Vedic god Agni has been built of exactly 10,800 bricks. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who 2,500 years ago was the first to propose that matter is transformable, counted time in aeons of 10,800 years each.

Another example of this number is to be found in Cambodia in the temple of Angkor Wat. This place is much older than most people think and it is decorated with 540 statues along five avenues. Each statue represents 20 years of time. They are erected exactly like the stone pillars, or steles of the Mayas which also represent 20 years each; and when you add them all, they represent 10,800 years. Finally, the German legend of the Nibelungen speaks of the 10,800 souls of dead warriors who enter the gates of Valhalla - the abode of the immortal heroes.

Can one really believe that all this is a coincidence or must one assume that all the legends containing the same exact number could have a common source or origin, be it terrestrial, solar, or galactic? These enormous 10,800- or 432,000-year spans prove at least that our ancestors many thousands of years ago had no fear of complicated calculations and that indeed they knew how to predict eclipses and other astronomical events for thousands of years in advance of their own time. But who were the gods or the astronauts who taught them this wisdom and presumably also brought them agriculture, metallurgy, and many other skills leading to civilization?

The answer may well be buried in the ancient Mayan city of Palenque in southern Mexico. It was there that on 15 June, 1952, Alberto Ruiz, a Mexican scientist, made a fantastic archaeological discovery. A few years earlier Ruiz had started to clear the ruins in Palenque and found a stairway leading to the inside of a step pyramid. The passage was clogged by debris. It took several years to clear the stairs and break through several walls. All of the work in Palenque had to be done during a few short months in between the rainy seasons. But when it was done and Ruiz went down into the stairwell, he found a magnificent burial chamber and an enormous bas-relief tombstone.

The stone slab was 1,600 mm wide, 2,200 mm long, and 250 mm thick. It weighed over 2 tons. And not one of these dimensions fitted the measurement systems of the Mayas or other Amerindian civilizations. Neither the Maya foot measuring 300 mm, nor the Tiahuanaco foot of 297 mm, nor the Cuenca foot of 348 mm seemed applicable to measure the Palenque tomb cover. It was clear that the builders of this tomb had used some much older system of measurement, possibly an ancestor of the metric system, like a foot of 360 mm and a hand of 90 mm, which were used for the Dresden Codex.

To top it all, the very well-preserved bas-relief depicted an astronaut sitting at the controls of a space vehicle! And it was unmistakably a spacecraft propelled by a jet exhaust. As a consequence, it is not difficult to imagine the amazement and even the furor of most establishment archaeologists when they heard of this discovery. And as is usual with them, crying 'Fraud!' was their only explanation.

However, the grave itself contained more shocks. When the heavy tombstone was finally lifted, the sarcophagus contained the wellpreserved skeleton of a white man who must have been at least 180 cm, or 70 inches tall; but the average height of a Maya rarely exceeded 150 cm, or 60 inches. The bas-relief was engraved with twenty-four hieroglyphs not yet deciphered. The sarcophagus was in the form of a fish - a symbol common to many ancient religions and probably hinting at the aquatic origin of man. Did Ruiz discover the tomb of the great Mayan god Kukulcan who, according to the legend, was tall and blond with a beard and blue eyes and had arrived one day from the land where the Sun rises?

THE SECRET OF THE PYRAMID

So many books have been written about the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, that it seems impossible today to write anything new about the subject. This statement is not quite true, however, since there is always some previously overlooked angle that can bring out new facts.

The majority of men specializing in exploring and mapping of the Great Pyramid agree today that the length of its base was 440 Egyptian cubits, one such cubit being one and a half millionth part of the territorial length of Egypt. Corresponding to a cubic cubit of 0.144 cubic metre, that makes the Egyptian cubit equal to 0.524148 metre and gives the pyramid a base length of 230.625 metres. This is slightly different from certain measurements made in inches, but the values of those inches are not clearly defined and nobody can really say how long the base of the pyramid was because its entire outer layer has been removed and used to build the mosques and palaces of Cairo. Also more than one Earth tremor has shaken the pyramid during its 5,000 years of existence, one of the most severe being an earthquake whose epicentre was the Aegean island of Thera, and which is thought by some to have destroyed the Cretan civilization in 1521 BC.

The main point of disagreement about the Great Pyramid of Cheops is its height. It cannot be measured today anymore because the whole top part has been carried away and destroyed by men and nature. Its height must have measured between 279 and 281 cubits; but it is very difficult to compute because three different mathematical concepts were used in building the pyramid and all three of these ways of calculating are slightly at odds with the methods of modern mathematicians working with decimals.

The first concept calls for exact proportions between the pyramid and our planet Earth. The height of the pyramid should be proportional to the radius of the Earth and the perimeter should be proportional to the circumference. The second principle requires that the area of each side be equal to the square of the height. The third demands that the volume of the pyramid be of exactly eighteen millions of cubic cubits.

At first glance these three conditions seem incompatible. But let us try, nevertheless, to reconcile them. To do this, we will have to calculate the triangle formed by a half-base line, the height, and the apothem - the shortest line between the summit of the pyramid and the middle point of one base line. We will have to make all calculations in cubits; and to make us understand the feeling the Egyptian architect must have had 5,000 years ago, we must remember all the time that the proportion between the height and half base of the pyramid has to be a very simple one because hundreds of thousands of stones will have to be cut to these specifications.

The first condition calls for the proportion between the height and the half-base to be 1.273239, or 4 divided by 3.141592. In that case, with a half base of 220, the height is equal to 280.112 cubits and the apothem to 356.178, which gives us the volume of the pyramid as 18,076,605 cubic cubits. Conditions two and three are not fulfilled but the dimensions are proportional to those of our Earth - the height to the radius and the perimeter to the circumference.

The second condition exacts a proportion of 1.272019, the square root of 1.618034 which is the golden section or factor PHI. Then the height is 279.84 cubits, the apothem 355.967 cubits, and the volume 18,059,288 cubic cubits. Conditions one and three are not reached, but the surface of one face is equal to the square of the height.

Condition three requires the proportion between the height and the half base to be 1.267843. In such case, the height is equal to 278.925
opposite
Pyramid of Cheops

Original dimensions in metres and cubits

Edge: 219.392 metres; base area : 53,188 square metres; volume : 2,592,000 cubic metres

Originally, the Pyramid of Cheops had a base side of 230.625 metres, or 440 cubits ; a base area of 53,188 square metres. or 193.600 square cubits ; and a volume of 2,592,000 cubic metres, or 18 million cubic cubits. The cubit used in this pyramid had a length of 524.148 millimetres.
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